China: A View of Our Future Food Supply

What makes us think that the future global food supply will be any more secure or reliable than China's is today?

I have written previously that national security is not just a matter of armies and borders.  Everything that sustains our nation is, ultimately, a matter of national security.  A clean, reliable, healthy food supply is one of the very most basic matters, and one which will soon be increasingly difficult and expensive to ensure.

Those who minimize the dangers of unchecked human population growth, or worse - misguidedly celebrate it, would do well to read Barbara Demick's recent Los Angeles Times article on China's secret, parallel food supply system for the elite and powerful, because this is what a food supply looks like when there are too many people to ensure a uniformly adequate quality.  While the select few dine on clean, safe, nutritious, and horrendously expensive organic foods,  the masses must make do with "foods that are increasingly tainted or less than healthful — meats laced with steroids, fish from ponds spiked with hormones to increase growth, milk containing dangerous additives such as melamine, which allows watered-down milk to pass protein-content tests," writes Demick.   

This is not just a matter of the masses being too poor to afford the best foods.  The very existence of these food supplies is kept secret, a measure against increasing public anger at privileges reserved for the elite, as well as a series of horrible and deadly scandals involving intentionally tainted foods.  And don't think you are immune:  recall the tainted pet food scandal of 2007, in which US pets died after eating foods containing imported Chinese wheat gluten and rice protein laced with melamine.  You can read the ingredients on pet-food labels, but they will not tell you where those ingredients originated.    And guess what?  Chinese ingredients are in a lot of your people-food, too.  And you can read the labels, but you can't tell where the ingredients come from.  Soylent Green, here we come.

Here is a telling excerpt from Demick's article:  "In modern-day China, it is the degradation of the environment and a limited supply of healthful food that is fueling the parallel food system for the elite."  This environmental degradation comes from  more people, more consumption, more industrialization.   The human population itself is destroying - has destroyed - much-needed food supplies, and restoring those food supplies, even imperfectly, takes more than a human lifetime of sustained determination and tremendous expense (which is why governments generally don't act until the problem is truly catastrophic).    For an example, look to the famously noxious River Thames:  it took more than a century of cleanup to see the first fish return.  And even after a successful cleanup, some species may be extinct, like the Chinese river dolphin, thanks to overfishing and pollution of the Yangtze River.  Other species may take a long time to reach numbers that can be sustainably harvested as food.  Meanwhile, the human population continues to grow and that's one less food supply to draw from.

Pay close attention to this excerpt from Demick:  "On their organic diet, the cows produce about half the volume of conventional dairy cows, meaning that the supply is never enough, especially since the 2008 scandal in which tainted milk left six Chinese babies dead and sickened 300,000 people....  'We're not Switzerland. Our population is way too big for everybody to eat organic food,' said Hou Xuejun, general manager of the Green Yard dairy."   Here, China's situation reveals the flaw in the argument that human population can expand indefinitely and agricultural science will magically fill the void:  while "conventional" dairy cows produce double the volume of milk, even that has been too often tainted and harmful to consumers.  Perhaps it is more a matter of unsavory administrators padding their profits, but there is no going back to natural practices; as Hou says, the population is "way too big" for that.  

China has long held the position of World's Most Populous Nation.  Even with their draconian one-child policy, their growth has continued, albeit more slowly than the global population.  In 1970, China's population stood at 790 million.  Today, they stand at 1.34 billion - about an 85% increase - and are having great difficulty ensuring a safe food supply.  Compare this to the global population:  in 1970, we stood at 3.5 billion.  Today that has doubled to 7 billion.  What makes us think that the future global food supply will be any more secure or reliable than China's?

China is a cautionary tale, a harbinger of the future for all homo sapiens, unless global population growth is checked.   Unfortunately, human beings don't have a real great track record when it comes to heeding cautionary tales, and we are quickly running up against this planet's Malthusian limitations. We already see this in such sobering statistics as this:  one out of six people on this planet right now has no access at all to potable water and must make do with unsafe water supplies.   China's current situation may look like the Land of Milk and Honey compared to what the global population will experience as our numbers continue to climb.

So how can the US help ensure an adequate food supply? 

First, do away with religious-based objections to contraception.  If there is one thing worth "exporting" to change world cultures, it is education, education, education, and especially empowerment of women worldwide.  Time and again it has been proven that women - and men - who are educated and given the option of contraception will choose to limit their family sizes to have healthier children.

Next, do away with big-agriculture monopolies on seed types.  I'm not saying we should all go organic; as China's experience shows, that's probably not even possible any more.  But there is a dangerous trend toward single-breed crops and herds, which are susceptible to being wiped out by a single disease.  Cloned plants and animals are even worse, as they have no diversity at all.  Crop diversity enhances overall survivability.  It's just good science.

In tandem with promoting crop diversity, we need to promote US farming and cut our dependence on Chinese imported ingredients in particular.  Check out the food in your supermarket:  I'm seeing canned peaches from Thailand, frozen shrimp from Bangladesh, fresh grapes from Chile.  It's great that our global system allows us to get out-of-season foods, but this will become prohibitively expensive in the future because of increased competition for both fuel to transport the food, and the food itself.  Locally grown food is cheaper and supply lines are shorter:  in a word, it's more secure, and we should do what we can now to promote better local supplies in the future, because more of us will depend on those for survival.